


Octeday I'm In Love

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: M/M, Pining, c'est tout
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:49:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26667733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: Rather he held the feeling at angle, like a hand of cards that you could just about see if you put in the effort to look.
Relationships: Havelock Vetinari/Samuel Vimes
Comments: 3
Kudos: 30





	Octeday I'm In Love

Vimes smelled like tobacco smoke, a smell so dry and cloying it made the clearer air a few feet further away a palpable presence. It was a sad smell, dark green, like running your hand across the edge of uncut pages.

There was a plaster across the bridge of his nose where someone had hit him. Looking at Vimes’ face, brushing off Vimes’ perfunctory apology for shouting at him about something he had misunderstood, Vetinari felt a sense of crystalline clarity. What this moment, what that strip of bandage, those searching brown eyes, familiar creases and scars in a face alive with intensity, made him feel, was like the sheet of glass that held the etching of an iconograph.

There were questions he could not ask without crossing a line he was not prepared to cross, comfort he could not give, and there was physical longing, clear and simple and strange, surfacing into consciousness made out of many moments like this.

He did not hide this. Rather he held the feeling at angle, like a hand of cards that you could just about see if you put in the effort to look.

“I don’t understand,” Vimes said, understanding perfectly well, but fuming at the implications of the clarification that Vetinari had been referring to a specific case rather than making a generalization. It was making what he had pieced together so far about the order in which things had happened fall apart.

“The more you listen, the more voices raised in articulate confusion and muddled certainty are harmonies to the roar of the crowd,” Vetinari said.

Vimes nodded. “I am listening.”


End file.
